From The Wall Street Journal:
As students return to school, I’m reminded of the cheerful Ivy League senior who casually confessed to me earlier this year that she didn’t like to read. A student guide, she was leading my family on a campus tour.
I admired her candor and wasn’t shocked to hear she thought books were a bore. A 2015 survey by Scholastic and YouGov showed a sharp decline in the share of young people who read for pleasure—a trend I’d noticed as an adjunct writing professor when I polled my students. Though curious and ambitious, many freshmen in my classes hadn’t read a book for fun since middle school. When I wrote about it in a 2013 Journal op-ed, I heard many similar stories from readers.
Even so, as I followed our guide around the immaculate campus, I was saddened that one of its degree candidates would soon be entering the world with no love for literature. The tuition, we learned, is nearly $70,000 a year. It’s tragic that such an expensive, elite education could yield a graduate unmoved by the magic of the written word.
To encourage personal reading, universities should start by making books more visible on campus. On my family’s tours of five schools, I was struck by how few books I saw, even in the libraries. Instead of pointing to grand shelves thick with volumes, library guides invariably ushered us into media hubs with computer terminals. These newly reimagined spaces look as inviting as call centers. The sterile setting suggests reading is a rote exercise, devoid of emotion or imagination.
. . . .
But campus bookstores, as I was reminded during our family’s travels, have pretty much gotten out of the book business. One typical two-story bookstore featured only two small shelves of trade titles tucked into a rear corner. The rest of the store was filled with T-shirts, toys and souvenirs.
The few volumes for sale included the essays of Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century Frenchman who declared: “From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal
I think what I’m taking from a lot of these articles, as well as those going into who readers are is that the age for passionate readers is skewed.
Instead of a significant percentage of people getting the reading bug in youth and carrying that throughout life, heavy readers now skew much older. Not as many new readers are spawned each year. Likewise, it seems that many young readers give up the practice at a certain age in favor of more immediate thrills, then take it up again later on.
I also don’t think people understand the question at all anymore. We don’t classify a lot of types of reading as reading anymore. People who spend hours on FB reading posts from everyone, or on Twitter, Reddit, Quora, or whatever else are reading. They’re just not reading books. Text, online articles, web pages, news sites…it’s all there.
Given the sheer number of words a young person consumes this day and age on a daily basis, it’s no wonder they don’t want to do more of it at the end of a day.
That’s just it, the OP doesn’t consider texting and all the other reading/writing kids do today as ‘reading’. Taking in a story can be done many ways, words on a printed page is only one of them.
On the one hand, reading is supposedly at an all-time low. People aren’t reading anymore. We’re uneducated louts.
OTOH… Amazon sold something like $750 million (Or more, I can’t remember the exact number) worth of books last year. The Kindle Paperwhite is routinely their best selling product and KU has over a million subscribers… Someone is reading.
Considering Amazon is dishing out author payouts at the rate of $360M a year, they’d better have at least three million subscribers and preferably six. The thing’s been running for four years and there is little strategic justification to keep it running at a loss that long. Not at that level.
At a minimum one would expect it to be running at breakeven.
The whole “people don’t read anymore” meme needs to be retired. A more realistic take is “the number of people reading peaked in the thirties and forties, in the heyday of the pulps, and then started declining until 2011”.
You’re just not seeing it from the OP’s angle. 😉
“The whole “people don’t read anymore” meme needs to be retired.”
No, just corrected to: “people don’t read ‘overpriced Trad-pub junk’ anymore”
Not everything tradpub is overpriced junk, you know.
Some is decades old backlist, on sale. 😉
Agreed, but nor is it all worth reading solid gold. 😉
While the qig5 is still playing their agency games buyers looking for current ‘best sellers’ they hit the overpriced semi-curated wall of things desperate agents offered to publishers in the hopes of getting 15% of anything.
The meme of course doesn’t take into account all those ‘shadow books’ sold on Amazon. As I recall, AE said the other reporting groups are missing over half the sales in sf-f …
http://authorearnings.com/sfwa2018/
So the numbers aren’t what the OP or the meme want you to believe. 😉
About the SF numbers: I was really happy to see that kind of news since it always made me sad when good writers just…stopped. The market for SF is small enough that you want the authors to net as much as possible and not have all the reader spend go to middlemen.
Indie economics mean more books get bought for the same reader spend and the authors get the bulk of it. That’s a win-win. As opposed to Agency 1.0 where readers had to pay more and authors got less.
With B&N seeing how low they can go, I have this funny feeling ‘agency’ won’t be an Amazon option for the qig5 next time around.
To encourage personal reading, universities should start by making books more visible on campus.
Never in history have books been more available and easier to get. If someone isn’t reading, it’s not because of supply.
And with the tons of cheap/free reading material to be found on the internet it isn’t the cost either – other than of their time of course …
Some kid is paying 70k a year to go to college and the author of the article thinks the fact that the kid doesn’t like to read is the tragic part?
I hope they are all looking to be MDs, lawyers or engineers. That $280,000 in sudent loan debt screams lack of a love of math more than reading otherwise.
…or really bad career guidance.
A lot of those kids taking on that debt are studying careers that might not even make them employable, much less let them retire that debt while ambulatory.
Too many get dazzled by the school brand and fail to consider what makes it special.
To speak of just one profession I can speak to, engineering, the vast majority of native students move on to the labor force right after their BS. (Some even before, through coop work/study programs and internships. Those tend to graduate almost debt free.) The demand and salary structure is too good to ignore. Many go back to school later on a part time or full time basis for advanced degrees but a long, successful, and rewarding career doesn’t require it. A four year degree from any accredited school suffices.
Now, there’s a lot of deservedly prestigious (and expensive schools) that produce world class experts in all sorts of engineering specialties but that is typically at the PhD level. They make perfect sense for somebody looking to become an authority in that specific area. Those jobs are fewer but if you’re good enough, you’ll succeed.
The thing is, the name universities are great at the post graduate level but at the undergraduate level they are practically indistinguishable from any other accredited school. Similar curriculuum, same textbooks, same “marketability” of their graduates.
A student that is not planning on sticking at, say, MIT all the way to the doctorate is not going to get the same bang for their debt as the student that goes to a state school.
It is up to their career counselor to get them to decide the best and most cost-effective course for them. Without it, they will enter their employment career with an unnecessary boat anchor tied to their leg.
I tend to wonder if all those stories about millennials preferring to rent instead of buy are simply finding they can’t actually afford to buy. Cause going out into the world with a six figure debt on day one is serious financial handicap.
The universities are only part of the problem. A bigger part belongs to the high schools.
The point about name brands and undergraduate versus graduate has been true since at least the 1980s when I was in school. Any large state school can provide a good undergraduate education in a wide range of majors. If a good undergraduate education is the goal, then paying for a prestige school is silly. On the other hand, often a good education is not the goal. If the goal is entry into networking, a prestige school might very well be a good investment. Getting a good education in this scenario is at best irrelevant and at worst a positive impediment, if you let it get in the way of that all-important networking.
True.
Going to the right school is very important if you want to join the Manhattan Mafia or go into politics.